Monday, February 23, 2009

It Makes No Sense To Me

It sorts figures that this is the only Riverdales record I own-- y'know, the one with the hockey song on it. I think I like punk rock only slightly more than I like hockey, but hockey's still better than bands that sound like a carbon copy of the Ramones, except if the band is Head, or Boris The Sprinkler covering "End Of The Century", and then it's a tie.

"Blood On The Ice" was also the name of a hockey newsletter that Ben Weasel used to write about the Chicago Wolves back when they were still in the lowly IHL. I don't have my copy anymore-- just a partial scan of the front cover-- but it wasn't that bad, really. Not as good as the hockey stories that Jason Schreurs used to write for his zine, but still better than the huge Riverdales interview that ran in MRR when they were only just getting started, with Ben already explaining how Riverdales songs were gonna get played on the radio and insisting over and over, "you guys won't like us, we're not a punk band this time, we sound like '50s rock." Okay, looks like you got me with that one, smart guy.

37 comments:

I side with Canada when it comes to the hockey-punk..those Hanson Brothers do it the best (with apologies to Two Man Advantage). Mr. Weasel always made me bristle a little, but I did appreciate the column he devoted to finding out about The Fastbacks late in the game and going nuts trying to find a copy of "Very, Very Powerful Motor" which I was ALMOST moved to package up and send to him.

This sounds better to me now than it did then..and makes me want to hunt down the album. Worst use of John Yates/Stealworks for design though! I'd expect a picture of Theo Fleury, toothless grin and all, smacking hand grenades into a goalie or something...I guess the ol' ugly guys in leather holding up a brick wall fit the bill for them!

Do you remember what the meaning of the big "27" was in connection with the Riverdales (and maybe his other bands, I don't remember)? I had completely forgotten about it until I saw the back cover scan here.

I remember being kind of excited about the possibility of another hockey-centric band, but that didn't last long. Think I liked his zine though.

Hopefully Jim can answer that one, because I've only been paying a little bit of attention to the Zero Boys re-issue (though it was blasting over the system at Redscroll Records when I went there the other day, and sounded really really good). I still have my original copy of the "History Of" cassette, and that's good enough for me.

First off, it's nice to see in this day and age that responses to a Riverdales post top the Obits one! Punk isn't dead..just a little senile and fighting over the last pudding cup.

Yuki Gipe, of Bullet LaVolta, did a few album covers..none of which I can recall at the moment..and also ended up in that Matador band Kustomized with one of the Mission Of Burma fellas. I was heading up to Boston to catch the Bullet LaVolta/Jawbox show and stopped at Looney Tunes to add some vinyl ballast to my backpack. I picked up a copy of "The Gift" and brought it to the counter. The guy behind the counter was fifty questions..."oh, you like these guys?..yeah? going to the show tonight? Well, if they suck make sure you throw some eggs!". I get to the show and of course the guy behind the counter turned out to be Yuki Gipe. This started a cross-state, multi-record store pattern of unknowingly buying records FROM people in the band I'm purchasing. (Drop Dead, Poison Idea, Jon Cougar Concentration Camp, Crackerbash, Six Finger Satellite..).

Oh, and Bruce...can you give me the secret code to unlock the Yohannon god-mode on "Zine Editor Hero?" I can't get the golden Kinko's copy card without it.

Yeah, I knew the thing about Kurt (Yukki Gipe) being from Indiana and doing some artwork before he moved to Boston, and so forth. I kinda wasn't all that into his "personna" to start off with, but then came Kustomized and The Konks (both great) and I had to change my thinking a bit...

I've never bought a record while one of the guys in the band was working the counter; I stood in line at a McDonald's in New Haven with two guys from The Muffs standing behind me, though.

Did he order a Muffburger? Bonus points if it was the guy from the Muffs AND White Flag who did the ordering. And wait a minute...are insinuating that the MRR headquarters wasn't a well oiled bunker of utopian cram-it-to-the-man-sideways bliss with no bias and equal division of work and labor and the highest cover art standards this side of "Slug & Lettuce"? *sniff* my iron-clad constructs, shattered on the floor and giving me tetanus!

There are no more brain cells I can dedicate to arcane Yuki Gipe knowledge, but I'd pay at least $5 to hear Mr. Quint talk about Unnatural Axe on the a-side of a spoken word 7" and parking lot stories from The Channel on the flip! But I'm an idiot like that.

Oh, and as fate would have it...I was the 27th comment on the 27th day. Perhaps the Riverdales had the ultimate foresight?

Someday I'll muster up the courage to pester Jim about the "Numbers With Wings" LP (I still think its a better feather in Hoboken's cap than Yo La Tengo!) and Bruce about the Rhythm Pigs/Dischord connection, and if I ever dig out my Amtrak Hockey jersey with the guy on skates racing the train in some sort of death match, it's all yours Mr. Brushback for bothering to maintain such an engaging forum. The verification for this message, incidently, is appropriately Freudian as well...idflaw!

MRR might've been cool for the first few dozen issues or so, but that zine was started by a bunch of smelly 60's hippies who weren't really punk at all.

I have one parking lot story from The Channel: they wouldn't let me in to a Big Black show because they wouldn't take my out-of-state ID (meaning I was standing out in the parking lot wondering what to do the rest of the night), so I ended up going to see Rank and File at TT The Bear's, who sucked big time. Thanks a lot, Channel!!

I think it must've been an employee pick-up team or community league from the Nighthawks era. The graphic is priceless...just a guy and his stick skating all out versus the 5:15 to Grand Central, in striking red white and blue for extra patriotic fervor. I'm going to have to find it now.

The newer issues of Factsheet Five (once they went to the glossy cover) were pretty good, as far as something to read on the bus or whatever. The older issues, when it was being put out by one guy in Upstate New York, are kinda dry.

I got reviewed in one of the original Factsheet Fives once as "obscure, cruel, and unusual".

The first Flipside I ever bought had an interview with Mike Gunderloy in it, when Flipside used to do a "Zine Editor of The Month" thing. It made Factsheet Five sound kinda cool, but in reality it was like reading a dictionary.

The glossy-covered FF5's that came out in the 90's, while still crap, at least had a little more zip to their writing, and some articles and zine gossip and stuff like that. It was always kinda funny to read about which zine editors were feuding with each other (something that Zine World later brought to perfection).

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This blog was originally intended to be a place for me to write about the records in my collection, regardless of their rarity/collectability-- or, at least, it was when I first started. Lately it's just been an excuse for me to make dumb jokes and spout off about a lot of stupid crap. Sometimes different things will be thrown in along the way just to confuse people and piss them off, which is okay. All screw-ups, wrong dates, and mis-statements will be ignored by me as if they were intentional, except for grammatical errors which will be edited and rewritten at least five or six times if necessary. Facts will often be misrepresented, as a way of mocking those people who think such things are important. Please note: This is just a hobby for me, and bands are written about here either because I own one of their records or because I've seen them play before and like them. Posting press releases for crappy bands that I have no use for is not really how I want to spend my spare time. If you want to know what kind of bands I like, just look at the sidebar to see which bands I've written about already, and you'll notice that your PR firm doesn't represent any of them. Most of the live band photos on this blog are mine, and if there's one of your band that you like then please feel free to use it, I don't care. It's your band anyway. The blog title itself was swiped from Paul Caporino-- "One Base on an Overthrow" was originally going to be the title of a M.O.T.O. record that I was going to release back in the '90s, but that never actually happened. Lucky for you, I guess.